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I went and listened to the RISC V BoF at SC22 a month or so ago, mostly because I wanted to hear what their plans for making the proliferation of extensions man
by PAPPPmAc 4y ago
I went and listened to the RISC V BoF at SC22 a month or so ago, mostly because I wanted to hear what their plans for making the proliferation of extensions manageable for toolchains and libraries looked like...
The presented plan included quality choices like "vendor toolchains forked from upstream that support their secret sauce features, but suck at everything else compared to mainline, and are only maintained until until the vendor runs out of VC money," "You can always use the nearest base profile and ignore the special hardware you theoretically paid this vendor a fortune for" and special attention to "Most of your workloads are torch or something anyway, just use the vendor's binaries."
I was not impressed.
- zozbot234 4y agoIf a "secret sauce feature" turns out to be generally useful with interest from multiple implementers, it can be standardized as an official ISA extension. If it doesn't, you're no worse off than if you used literally any other bespoke ISA - except that your vendor toolchains will likely be higher quality if they're built on a shared RISC-V base.